Steg25

Alright. I've found the "answer" but its obviously encoded in a clever way. I know what "encryption" it isn't, because I've tried several different encryptions. Normally I can logic this stuff out, but I'm completely stumped on this one. A nudge would be great.

RE: RE: Steg25

Hopefully, this will not spoil the challenge for anyone.
Possibly confuse some people *hmm*

I have solved the stego part of this challenge, which I really enjoyed. First I did it partly, and could not make sense of it. And then I dug some more and unvealed the hidden secret.

But understanding the secret maybe belongs to encryption challenges?
I cannot unriddle this.. I have tried morse code, gray code and multiple character encodings. Part of the problem is that it is not obvious which direction to read the bits. I have tried forward, backward, up, down, group by four, by eight and so on.

Problem with character encoding, is that there are probably more encoding schemes than there are encryption algorithms. So the problem is finding the algorithm, not the key. A small collection of bits with no encoding information really makes no sense. I could decrypt this with a 64 bit XOR key and get whatever result I want, but of course not the correct answer.

Maybe I just did not guess an obvious encoding. What would really help is to know how many bits create a character. Is it 4, 8, 16?
Also, which is zero and which is one?
To make it clear, I have these possibilities for the first 4 bits of the secret:
0110 0111 0101 1001 1000 1010
These are following natural directions starting from the top left without knowing which is zero and which is one.
If I grey decode them, I get these options:
0100 0101 0110 1110 1111 1100

Maybe I'm just being stupid, or lazy.
I think it is rather easy to create an 'unbreakable' crypto if you are only encrypting a small amount of characters. E.g. OTP is actually unbreakable as long as the key is secret.

RE: Steg25

Now this challenge is all about permutations.
I actually solved it using a known plaintext attack
I will give you all a hint:
Normally, we tend to start at the beginning when decoding stuff.
But, try to think of an encoding that has a magic byte in the end, not the beginning. Then looking for this byte in the end should reveal the permutation scheme.

However, you are still not finished. PM me if you are still banging your head. Remember, I said this challenge is all about permutations...

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